By this statement, which so easily lends itself to misunderstanding, Luther does not mean to put women in the alternative of choosing either marriage or vice. In another passage of the same writing he says distinctly, what he repeats also elsewhere: “It is certain that He [God] does not create any woman to be a prostitute.” Still, it is undeniable that in the above passage, in his recommendation of marriage, he allows himself to be carried away to the use of untimely language.—In others of the passages cited he modifies his brutal proclamation of the force of the sexual craving, and the inevitable necessity of marriage, by statements to quite another effect, though these are scarcely noticeable amid the wealth of words which he expends in favour of man’s sensual nature; for instance, he speaks of the “holy virgins,” who “live in the flesh as though not of the flesh, thanks to God’s sublime grace.”[759] “The grace of chastity”[760] was, he admits, sometimes bestowed by God, yet he speaks of the person who possesses it as a “prodigy of God’s own”;[761] such a one it is hard to find, for such a man is no “natural man.”[762] Such extravagant stress laid on the fewness of these exceptions might, however, be refuted from his own words; for instance, he urges a woman whose husband is ill to do her best with the ordinary grace of God bestowed on her as on all others, and endure with patience the absence of marital intercourse. “God is much too just to rob you of your husband by sickness in this way without on the other hand taking away the wantonness of the flesh, if you on your part tend the sick man faithfully.”[763] That for most men it is more advisable to marry than to practise continence had never been questioned for a moment by Catholics, and if Luther had been speaking merely to the majority of mankind, as some have alleged he was, his very opponents could not but have applauded him. It is, however, as impossible to credit him with so moderate a recommendation as it is to defend another theory put forward by Protestants, viz. that his sole intention was to point out “that the man in whom the sexual instinct is at work cannot help being sensible of it.” His real view, as so frequently described by himself, is linked up to some extent with his own personal experiences after he had abandoned the monastic life. It can scarcely be by mere chance that a number of passages belonging here synchronise with his stay at the Wartburg, and that his admission to his friend Melanchthon (“I burn in the flames of my carnal desires ... ‘_ferveo carne, libidine_’”)[764] should also date from this time.